


this guilty land

by WolfOfAnsbach



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: 1860s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Civil War, Gen, subject to updating as I do or do not feel like it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-02 23:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16314389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfOfAnsbach/pseuds/WolfOfAnsbach
Summary: "What is the worth of liberty? We saw the promise of our fathers writ in the blazing sky over Sumter, and the sacred duty fell to us, to make truth of empty words. Liberty. Equality. Brotherhood. A contest of sword and musket to decide if the flower of freedom should wither or bloom. I am a humble man and I hail from a humbler town. But I will tell you a tale of armies and peoples. I will tell how Bull Run took our blood and how trembled the walls of Vicksburg. I will tell how the dead paved the road to Richmond and how iron titans clashed at Hampton Roads. I will tell how the rebel army crossed the Potomac and how chains shattered. I will tell how the Carolinas burned and how deep the trenches at Petersburg ran. Come, gentle reader, and learn what it truly costs to hallow the earth.""Really, Jughead, you could cut a solid three quarters of that and you wouldn't lose much."_________Dispatches from Riverdale's Civil War





	1. the course of human events

**Author's Note:**

> For the sake of my own sanity this isn't going to get any kind of overarching story or arc, I'll just post vignettes of Riverdale character's experiences of the civil war as the fancy does or does not strike me. Probably out of chronological order.

" _As a nation of free men we must live for all time or die by suicide"_

 _-_ Abraham Lincoln, 1838

* * *

 

**December, 1860**

“Do you see those stars falling, dear?”

Cheryl sighed and shook her head.

Her grandmother tried to rise from her sagging oak chair. She failed, and sank back down. Cheryl scanned the sky. The morning star was there, along with Orion’s Belt, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly no falling stars.

She looked back to her grandmother.

Rose Blossom could not really see much of anything. Her hundredth birthday was on the horizon.

And yet she always saw things. Signs in the sky. Omens flitting in the dark shadows of the Eversgreen Forest. Portents swirling in the foaming river.

“No, grandmother,” Cheryl sighed, very patient. “Have you partaken of father’s wormwood, again?”

Grandmother ignored her. She gazed up into the restless heavens. The moon wore a crown of stars. Maybe Cheryl could not see them falling, but the old woman certainly could. Falling stars were a bad omen. Or at least they were to the old folks. This was the 19th century, and such things were being quick dispelled by the unyielding light of reason. Scientific inquiry. The world was making sense. 

“But I see them,” Rose muttered, and she reached a trembling old hand up towards the sky.

“Dear grandmother,” Cheryl said tolerantly. “Those poor old eyes of yours are older than the Union. Let’s get you to bed, shall we? Tomorrow’s your big day.”

She reached down and took her grandmother by the arm, and lifted her to her weary feet. Rose was intransigent and found the idea of a wheeled chair absolutely comical. They hobbled together off of the balcony and back into Thornhill.

“Do you know when I last saw stars fall like that, darling?” Rose rasped out.

“Yes, yes, grandmother,” Cheryl assured her. “On the eve of the first crack of muskets at Lexington, that spake liberty and made all the sovereigns of Europe tremble. We all remember.”

“And now…”

“And now  _nothing_ , everything proceeds just fine,” Cheryl cut her off, less sure than she wanted to project.

As they headed back inside, the stars glittered at their backs.

Riverdale’s church bell struck midnight.

Cheryl would have to change the calendar, now.

It was December 20th, 1860.

* * *

Jughead was lathered into a frenzy.

“I’m telling you,  _the final contest is upon us_.”

Miss Veronica stared at him in mild amusement.

“What contest might that be?”

Jughead’s cheap black cape fluttered on his shoulders. He pulled it tighter round himself and for his efforts received precisely no protection from the fierce winter wind.

Riverdale’s town square was not particularly peopled today. He and Veronica lingered on the porch of Tate’s General Store, while Miss Elizabeth conducted her business inside.

“Take me seriously! He snapped.”

Veronica scrutinized him. His cape was a ruffled, natty thing cut out of old sheets and winter coats. There was a tschako tucked under his arm, the one his father had brought back from his military stint out west. They marked him out as the premier and only member of Riverdale’s chapter of the Wide Awakes (with the occasional and conditional exception of Dilton Doiley, who relished the opportunity to perform musket drills more than anything).

“That’s really no small feat.”

He elected to ignore her.

“If South Carolina makes good on her threa—“

“Jughead,” Veronica assured. “South Carolina does this  _all the time_.”

“But this time I think they really mean it!”

“They say that each and every time they threaten secession! Trust me, they’ll be settled down in a fortnight.”

“Bu—“

The doors to Tate’s store swung open. Out came Elizabeth Cooper holding reams of printers’ paper.

“I hope your mother and father are ready to print history,” he said very gravely.

“Honestly, Jughead,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t you ever concern yourself with matters aside form wars and rumors of wars?”

The trio meandered down main street, where they encountered, as often they did, Archibald Andrews.

He raised his hand in greeting.

“Hallo!”

“Afternoon, Archie” came the chorus.

After a little while, Archibald’s eyes brightened and he said: “Isn’t today Old Rose Blossom’s birthday?”

“Oh! It is!” Elizabeth exclaimed, seemingly quite gladdened by the news.

“I’ve really never understood why the great feat of  _being born_ is so worthy of celebration,” Jughead said, bitterly.

“Just be quiet for the rest of the day,” Veronica pleaded.

* * *

But indeed, Riverdale found something to be celebrated in the centennial of Rose Blossom. So that evening they decked the square in star spangled flags, scrounged together some of the more musically capable townsfolk under the direction of Miss Josephine McCoy, and called all the good people of Riverdale to come and be merry.

“Where’s your father?” Jughead demanded of Cheryl, who stood half-protectively behind her grandmother. “Wasn’t this revel his idea?”

“He’s still in Washington,” Cheryl sniffed, crossing her arms.

Rose Blossom leaned straight back in her chair. She hardly blinked and her muscles appeared frozen, but she did not seem senile or entranced. Far from it.

But anyway, Cheryl’s response was exactly what Jughead wanted to hear.

“What’s the news from Washington?”

“Chaos. As is usual of late. Father had trouble getting into the senate chamber because the mob was…seething. He says half the southern senators have already made up their minds to secede. He—“

“Yes!” Jughead exclaimed. “Now we’ll settle with the bloody little tyrant slavers and all—“

“You’re scaring my dear grandmother,” Cheryl said flatly.

“You really aren’t, dear boy,” she assured him.

On a makeshift scaffold some distance away, Captain Keller of Riverdale’s moribund militia made a rambling speech comparing Rose Blossom’s life to that of the young United States, may their banner wave forever.

Miss Josephine led the homespun band in a rendition of ‘Hail Columbia’.

Antoinette Topaz ambled over. She rarely maintained a permanent home in town, and was a sort of phantom who was here and then there.

“Congratulations, Missus Blossom,” Antoinette said, bowing solemnly. Old Rose made a slight move of the hand, which was really all she could do. Cheryl huffed. “What are you two quarreling about?” Antoinette asks.

“Mr. Jones expects the scenes of ‘76 from the troubles down south,” Cheryl said wryly.

“Only this time,  _all_ men will be free,” Jughead said, feverishly.

“Oh, Jughead,” Antoinette said. “If the men in Philadelphia couldn’t extirpate slavery, what makes you think your Mr. Lincoln can?”

“It’s not about Mr. Lincoln,” Jughead asserted. “It’s—“

“You wept when he was elected,” Cheryl reminded him.

“I was  _unmanned_ ,” Jughead corrected.

“It’s always empty words,” Antoinette said gravely. “The slavers in the south are never enervated, only stronger. If they could drag us into that war with Mexico, there’s nothing they can’t do.”

“Lincoln will give them what they want,” Cheryl said, very certain. “We always do.”

The band switched tunes, and began to play the Star Spangled Banner.

Jughead prepared to respond.

Then the clattering of horse’s hooves drew the attention of all the crowd. Even Grandmother Blossom managed to raise her wizened head.

The rider charged into the square and dismounted in a puff of dust. The stars shone overhead.

It was Mr. Cooper, as far as anyone could tell, returned from the city and then from Greendale much ahead of schedule. He whipped off his hat and wiped his brow. News, surely.  _Real_ news. News that couldn’t wait for the regular channels of communication.

He raised a slip of paper in a gloved hand. A telegraph, perhaps. Greendale had such luxuries, Riverdale did not.

“South Carolina’s declared secession,” he announced, loudly. “The Union is dissolved.”

A grim silence.

Then Jughead spoke words he’d waited long to speak.

“ _Alea iacta est.”_

* * *

 

That night, a star fell. If only old Rose Blossom had been privy to the first, all Riverdale saw this one.

It fell and then vanished in a flash of light, and from the serpentine Mississippi to the choppy Boston Harbor, the land sank back into darkness


	2. patriotic gore

 

" _The rebels down in Maryland, they madly raved and swore_

_they'd let none of our Union troops pass through to Baltimore!_

_But our noble northern regiments, no traitors did they fear,_

_and fought their way to Washington like Yankee volunteers!"_

-'The New York Volunteer'

* * *

 

** April 1861 **

“So this is the south?” 

“This is Maryland,” Jughead clarified. “Maryland isn’t quite south, not quite north."

“No?” Sweet Pea pressed. “What is it, then?”

“It’s Maryland.”

The big man grumbled. The train chugged and groaned to a halt. The tracks hissed beneath them. Jughead breathed a near-silent prayer of thanks. The trip down south had nearly cost him his last meal a half a dozen times. He’d never been on a train in his life (nor had most of the boys in the 53rd New York), and crammed into a single dingy carriage with fifty other young men and as many muskets was a hell of an initiation. One could hardly take a step without a bayonet-jab in the side.

The doors pulled open. A mass of hot, wet air threw the Yankee boys back.

Sweet Pea waved it away like it was a stench.

“It’s like a fucking cauldron down here, good Christ.”

Jughead blinked. He could already feel the beads of sweat dribbling over his skin. A few patchy knots of spectators watched the disembarking soldiers (or militiamen, really) with unreadable expressions. There was no cheering or shouting. Just a solemn silence.

Company C of the 53rd (until lately the town militias of Riverdale, Greendale, and a half-dozen other little Rockland towns, now reorganized for federal service) trooped off of the train in poor order. There had been precious little time for drilling or marching in the furor following the rebels’ attack on Sumter. These country boys could fire guns, but that was hardly the full measure of soldiering.

It was only Spring, but the southern heat was already unbearable. Jughead felt his head grow light. The twin tolls of the sun and the exacting journey weighed on him. Sweet Pea jabbed him in the back.

“Wake up!”

He shoved himself upright. Already he was beginning to second guess the patriotic fervor that had sent him and every other young man in town rushing to the colors. His head hurt. He didn’t think he could whip a cold in this state, much less a rebel. His pack was too heavy (probably less heavy if he hadn’t stuffed it full of books alongside everything else, but one could not change the past). He knew how to shoot alright. His father had been in Mexico (and hated every second of it), and hunted regularly. But today the musket felt like lead in his arms. He was hardly dressed for the occasion, either. He wore the antiquated, continental-style coat of the Riverdale militia, left over in the town storehouses from God-knew-when. An off-brown slouch hat sat on his head. His boots were the only pair his family owned. The rest of his comrades were similarly ill-fitted. There was as yet no issuance of uniforms _en masse_ from the government. Even Keller looked like a figure from the Battle of New Orleans.

His enthusiasm had been on a steady decline from that night in the town square when he’d felt ready to hang every secessionist to the nearest tree and destroy the slave power forever.

Sweet Pea towered next to him and he felt even smaller than normal.

Captain Keller lined the company up on the rail platform. He himself had never tasted combat save for the one time in ’53 the militia had been called out to help put down some drunken riot two towns over. The company was green to the core.

Jughead turned his head to the right and took in the old, cramped streets of Baltimore. They seemed suspiciously empty, as if something had cleared the way for them. He spotted a few flags fluttering from windowsills and terraces. But saw nothing of Old Glory—only the stars and bars of rebellion. A chill spread over his shoulders, down his back, and into his stomach.

Keller opened his mouth and told the freshly minted soldiers what they already knew.

“There’s no passage through Baltimore by rail. We’re going to march through the city to our point of embarkment in good, military order. Like _soldiers_. And listen to me well—this is not New York City or Boston. This is Baltimore. You will be jeered at and taunted. You will be abused and mocked. You won’t answer any civilian, male or female. You’ll march straight ahead, face forward. Should the crowd assault you with missiles, you will ignore these as well. You will not speak or sing. You will discharge your weapons if and only if you are first fired upon.”

So the instructions were issued, and Company C, along with the whole 53rd, turned around and began its march through Baltimore.

There were only a few spectators at first. They drifted along the streets and watched. No words of abuse yet. A young man spit at his feet. Jughead’s eyes flickered to his left, where he saw the muscles in Sweet Pea’s throat twitch.

“Shut up,” Jughead muttered preemptively. “Don’t say “ _anything_.”

“I wasn’t _going_ to,” Sweet Pea protested.

“Yes you w— _shut up_!” Jughead hiss-whispered.

They rounded a corner and the crowds grew thicker. They leaned out of windows, too, watching the US troops tramp by with a decided distaste.

“Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” Someone along the way cried, answered by the approving whoops and cheers of his compatriots. 

Jughead watched Sweet Pea’s throat move again, and this time his lips twitched, too.

“ _Shut up_!”

The trickle of abuse quick opened up into a torrent.

“Long live the confederacy!”

“Black Republican pigs!”

The crowds swelled. Jughead’s heart beat faster. His pack bounced on his back. All the books of adventure hoarded away in there could not compare to the timorous agony of this short march. Soon the walkways along the old stone street were packed to bursting with shouting, jeering Baltimoreans. 

He’d known the city was a tumultuous one, but he had expected perhaps a word of derision here and again, not this unanimous hatred. It could not be so much longer to the next station, could it?

The crowd began to belt out ‘Dixie’.

Jughead began to hum ‘Oh Susanna’ under his breath.

“I thought we were supposed to shut up?” Sweet Pea snapped.

Jughead stopped humming.

The crowd began to spill over into the street itself, and the way through became narrower. He could feel the tension strung through the air between him and his comrades, between them and the people of Baltimore.

Someone threw a chunk of brick. It struck no one and bounced off along the road. Shouts and jeers. Still the New York troops maintained their silence. But their marching tempo began to falter. What perfunctory training they did have was quick melting away in the moment. A bottle came next, and it shattered at Jughead’s feet. He stumbled back and spilled into Sweet Pea, who swore and nearly knocked the next man in line over the skull with his musket. They only just kept the entire column from collapsing.

The crowd closed in, and when they next rounded a corner the way was blocked.

“Go home, Yankee bastards!” Someone cried.

“Halt!” Keller shouted.

The column halted. They reeled before the crowd that had now become a mob. Jughead picked out men in the multitude wielding bars of iron or gnarled wooden clubs. His breathing intensified and he felt the sweat soak through his pants and coat.

The missiles came like rain now. A little pebble glanced over Jughead’s brow, opening up a brief cut just to the right of his right eye. He flinched. Warm blood dripped down the bridge of his nose.

“I know you’re thinking of something,” he hissed at Sweet Pea. “Don’t do _anything_.” The big man just frowned.

The bottles and stones poured down all around them, and soon there was hardly a man not bleeding from the head or arms.

The world hung in suspension. The Yankee troops were hemmed in on all sides by a mob that by all appearances was quick making the leap from hostile to murderous. They stood stock still, disallowed by fear and orders to respond. The missiles kept coming.

A good-sized brick pegged Sweet Pea square in the chest.

“Goddamned secesh sons of bitches!”

Overcome with fury, he shouldered his musket. The mob temporarily froze to see one of the soldiers leveling his weapon at them. Keller turned his head to search out the cause of the sudden detente. Then the crowd seethed forth again. Sweet Pea trained his musket into the heart of the human mass.

Then a man pushed forth from the morass. He stalked forth with purpose. A hand slipped into his coat. Jughead’s first thought was: _pistol_ , and it was one he was sure every other man in the regiment shared. He watched Sweet Pea track his weapon across the crowd, and his sights fall on the man.

He began to draw out whatever it _was_ under his coat. Jughead’s mouth went to dry. It was almost as they said—one’s life repeated in his head as death neared. He saw Riverdale and his friends and family and the Sweetwater River and the dusty street outside of Tate’s general store all jumbled together into one swamp of memory.

Then his vision narrowed to a pinprick and dragged him to this moment, as Sweet Pea’s finger closed over the trigger. Had even a moment gone by? The man’s hand was still in his coat, and he was still drawing out his concealed instrument.

“Sweet Pea, don—“ he tried.

But then the musket cracked. Jughead watched in a stupefied horror as the man who may have had a pistol was blown back as if punched. A spray of brilliant red blood exploded from his chest and fell in a splatter over the streets of Baltimore. Then he crumpled over dead.

The mob screamed. And everything descended into hell.

The air snapped and hissed in a chorus of musket fire and then the quick, staccato answering shots from the men in the crowd who, it seemed, _did_ have pistols.

“Fire! Fire at will!” Keller shouted over the din. Indeed, he was only giving his blessing to a _fait accompli_. The bullets whizzed by like hornets. Without hardly meaning to, Jughead shouldered his own musket and let off a wild, desperate shot into the seething mob. All along the length of the company, now dissolved into a mob of its own, weapons spat back at their tormentors. Jughead watched a row of Baltimore men tumble over into the gutter, struck down by Yankee fire. Acrid smoke curled over the street and coalesced into a thick impassable cloud. Iron of the blood stabbed at the nostrils. Jughead stumbled back and went careening into a few of his comrades.

He fell to his knees and struggled to reload his weapon as bullets wailed over him. He groped for his ramrod, clasped it, and then dropped it onto the street with a _clang_. He dove for it, and then in a cloud of smoke someone ran by and kicked it aside.

And before he could reach for the pouch of ammunition or the horn of powder, it had finished. He staggered to his feet, and the musket slipped from his tired fingers. The smoke cleared. Corpses littered the street, and the mob had fled or else stumbled back in temporary defeat. Through his weary, tear-filled eyes, Jughead picked out some dozen dead Baltimore folk strewn over the stones.

Then there were two of theirs.

The first two he didn’t know. They were boys from Greendale.

The last he didn’t know _well_. But he knew him. It was the Button boy, Benjamin. Jughead was not sure he had ever exchanged a word with him, but he’d _seen_ him. He’d existed, even if just vaguely. He’d seen him fishing at the riverbank, or coming out of Tate’s. Or tipped his hat to him along the way to church. And now he was laid out over the bloodied cobblestones, chest stove in by a bullet, eyes glassy and shallow. Jughead ran a hand through his own hair, matted with dust and blood. To see Button dead like this was not so much sad as it was _haunting_.

Something had _changed_. A great tear had been opened in the fabric of the world. 

“We’re proceeding,” Keller said curtly.

“But—“ tried Marmaduke Mason, referrin to their slain.

“They’ll be recovered,” Captain Keller assured. “On to the station.”

The mob was stunned, but they would recover their courage. It was best to finish the march through Baltimore now. The crowd had thinned out but it wouldn’t be long, Jughead figured, until they were back in force.

So the 53rd shakily fell back into line. Jughead saw Archie Andrews some thirty men away, and was too tired to call out to him. His vision was dim. Sweet Pea got back into line next to him. Neither said anything.

As they marched off in shaky order, they passed the corpse of the first man killed, the one who had reached into his coat. His hand was still there, forever clasped around whatever it was he and a dozen others had died for.

For a moment, Jughead considered stopping and pulling back the man’s coat and if there was a pistol there he could tell himself that it had all not been meaningless. But if there was not a pistol and only a stone or a bit of iron…

His tongue tasted metallic, and he clenched his teeth to drive it away. Tears washed some of the grime from his cheeks.His legs were weak.

Someone, somewhere along the line, started up a song. Everyone quick took it up, eager to be brave and to show the rebels they would not be cowed.

“ _Oh, we’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree_

_We’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree_

_We’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree,_

_As we go marching on!”_

Jughead found it quite odd to feel the words slipping out of his mouth with little real input from him.

“What if that man had nothing?” Sweet Pea asked, just about catching Jughead’s train of thought.

Jughead asked himself the same question again. Then he decided on what he figured was a proper answer.

“What if he did?”

And they could both imagine that.

And the regiment marched on.

“ _Then three rousing cheers for the Union_

_Three rousing cheers for the Union_

_Three rousing cheers for the Union,_

_As we go marching on!”_


	3. open wounds

_ "Oh, I'm a good ol' rebel, now that's just what I am _

_ I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn!" _

_ -' _ The Good Old Rebel'

* * *

** October 1868 **

“So then Blossom marches in with his seven thousand men right into the snare we’ve laid out for him. And…the poor boy never saw it coming. The yankees died like _flies_. I could have walked from one end of the field to the other on a carpet of dead bluebellies.” Penny Peabody sucked in a lungful of smoke and giggled at the delightful memory. She plucked the cigar from her lips and tapped a bit of ash onto the worn wood floor.

The little audience huddled round the table laughed, more at the drink in their veins than at the story. Malachi leaned back, his shoulder brushing Penny’s. He proffered a big smile.

“I can still taste the blood,” he cooed, sharing in his companion’s sweet recollections.

Brisk, dry desert breeze battered at the swaying saloon walls. The door, bereft of a lock, swung wildly on its hinges. The din of carousal and conflict carried for miles around through the dusty Santa Fe streets. 

“Your turn,” said a rail-thin man with a sand-scarred face and the beard of an old Israelite prophet.

Penny smiled gladly and revealed her hand. Malachi chuckled. The table groaned, and she swept up a pile of chips.

“Fortune’s good to you, woman,” one of the players barked.

“Nah,” Penny oozed. “You boys just aren’t very smart.”

Malachi laughed again.

One of the card players, a younger man in a miner’s cap, who had been watching the woman and her hands for some time, finally spoke.

“Or maybe you ain’t playing fair?” The boy charged.

Malachi’s easy, light smile disappeared in a flash. Penny’s weakened but stayed put. The table fell silent. The entire saloon gave up some of its luster.

Penny took another drag of her cigar and tapped out more ash, this time in her accuser’s direction. The young man flinched.

“No?” She asked, smoothly.

The boy in the miner’s cap gathered up his courage.

“I almost…maybe…could come to suspect…you’d got a card or two hid up that sleeve.”

Another short silence.

Then Malachi’s broad, calloused hand shot out, grabbed a knot of the boy’s hair, and slammed him face first into the table. A shower of chips clattered to the saloon floor. The fellow in the corner forcing ‘ _The Yellow Rose of Texas’_ out of his poorly strung guitar stopped short. Someone gasped. The boy moaned, blood dripping out of his shattered nose. Before he could collect himself, Malachi drew a massive, ugly bowie knife from his belt. He forced the boy’s head back to the table, like a hog he was about to carve up, and brought the blade’s tip to his victim’s face. The boy's animal shrieks drowned out everything else as the big man carved a line of red-hot agony from his eyebrow to his lip.

Penny threw down her cards, stood, and leaned over the poor prone creature. She brought her face close to his. Malachi drew back a bit, and retracted his knife, to give his companion some space to torment the boy in her own way. The neat, narrow wound sliced from his brow to jaw dripped bright, thick blood onto the beaten old table. 

“You think I’m a _fraud_ , lad?” Penny seethed. She reached out a hand, and Malachi wordlessly handed her the knife. “You think I’m _dishonest?”_ Curls of blonde hair hung down round her hard face and tickled the boy's. He flinched as a flaxen lock tickled his fresh wound.

“I—I—“ before he could finish his stammering, she flicked the knife to the left and in a single brutal, swift move, cut off his earlobe. The young man howled in pain. The other card-players watched in wordless stupefaction. Penny grabbed him by the hair and hurled him to the ground. In an instant, clutching his mutilated face, the boy leapt to his feet and charged out of the saloon, dripping blood as he went.

A terse half-silence took hold and reigned.

“'Nother evening in Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory," Malachi said, raising his drink. 

That broke it, and an awkward ripple of laughter went through the drunken patrons of the place. The hateful pair retook their seats at the table, and Malachi bent down and collected the scattered chips.

“What’s everyone so wound up for?” Penny laughed. She jabbed the bloodied knife at the musician in the corner, who cringed away. “Why don’t you play us a song?”

The man only held his guitar, evidently rendered incapable.

“Wh—what’d you wanna hear, ma’am?” He finally managed to mumble.

Penny tapped her chin with the sullied blade, leaving a few droplets of blood glistening on her jaw.

“Why don’t we hear 'Dixie'?”

“Yes'm.”

And so the man struck up that tune. Penny smiled, satisfied, and with her companion, retook her seat at the table for the unfinished game of cards.

“Where’d we leave off?” Penny asked of the other players.

“You uh…” started one man from beneath a floppy straw hat. “Well, you won yourself a few dollars and then…you was telling us a story, Penny.”

“About Blossom at Petersburg,” Malachi clarified.

Penny’s eyes half-closed and she continued her tale.

“ _Of course_. Well poor Blossom stumbled right into our guns, just as we worked it out. It was a regular slaughter pen. You boys ever been to a hog house? You could hardly tell pieces of one Yankee from the next,” she laughed. “Of course, too many of them were still sucking air…” She waved the knife. "So we got to work..."

“There are _still_ too many yanks sucking air!” Malachi interjected to more nervous laughter. "Wish we'd gotten 300,000 more."

* * *

Across the saloon, the musician plucked his guitar to the tune of ‘Dixie’ and sung along in a careful, uneasy tone.

“ _Ole missus marry Will the Weaver, William was a gay deceiver, look away, look away, look away, Dixie land…”_

He kept an eye on the blonde woman who’d just cut half a boy’s face of and then sat back down to a game of cards. That sort of occurrence wasn’t exactly _rare_ in the territories, but he didn’t much like to see it, either. _Her_ kind weren’t rare out here, either. Incorrigible rebels who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept they’d lost the war. So they struck out west, eager to get as far from the United States and from the old flag as heaven and earth would allow.

And by God, they were still angry.

“ _Then I wish I was in Dixie, hurray, hurray! In Dixie’s land, I’ll take my stand, I’ll live and die in D—“_

Then the poor musician felt the unmistakable pressure of a revolver’s barrel pressing into his temple. He sighed and the rest of the song dissolved on his tongue. This wasn’t so uncommon, either. He heard his assailant pull back the hammer on the six-gun. 

“You know,” sighed a soft, feminine voice. “I can’t say I’m really all that fond of that song. Why don’t you play me something else?”

The musician turned his head very slowly, to get a good look at whoever it was had a revolver aimed at his skull.

He met the grimy face of a young woman half-obscured in the shadow of a drooping old slouch hat. A too-big US army sergeant's coat of faded blue was cinched around her waist with a gun belt. A few ginger tresses poked out from beneath the brim of her hat, but her hair was hacked short just above the shoulders. She pressed a pair of full lips together into an indeterminably expressive line, and narrowed two deep, dark brown eyes.

“What would you…like to hear, miss?” The musician asked.

“I doubt there's a musician in this great republic who doesn't know 'The Battle Cry of Freedom'…”

* * *

Penny was in the middle of relaying her favorite part of the story—the bit with the mutilated Yankee troopers who’d gotten their guts all mixed up with those of their horses—when she noticed that she wasn’t hearing ‘Dixie’ anymore.

And not only was she not hearing Dixie, but she was hearing a tune she very much did _not_ want to be hearing.

“ _The Union forever, hurrah boys, hurrah! Down with the traitors and up with the stars!”_

Her lips snapped into a furious grimace. She whipped her head around to chastise—or maybe shoot—the musician. Her hand went to the pistol at her hip.

But there was someone between her and the guitarist.

A shape in a hat and US soldier’s coat with tarnished buttons and faded dye stalked across the saloon towards her. The old Union cavalry boots jingled. A revolver hung from the right hand. Penny squinted at the shadowy, dirt-streaked, desperately angry face under the hat. She could not discern masculine nor feminine figure beneath the thick, practical manner of dress. 

Then the phantom came just a little closer, and Penny caught a flash of the eyes and the red hair and a bolt of terror went into her.

“ _Bon soir,_ Miss Peabody,” Cheryl Blossom sneered through clenched teeth. In a flash she brought up her revolver and leveled it at Penny’s face. “Should you move another inch out of your seat…” the sentence didn’t really need to be finished. “Good woman,” Cheryl smiled as Penny emphatically sat back down “Hands on your knees, if you please. As far as humanly possible from that six-gun at your hip.” Penny grudgingly complied. “That’s generally applicable, you loathsome secessionist reptile,” Cheryl spat, retraining her revolver on Malachi, who rather slowly lifted his own hands into the air.

“You’re a _long_ way from New York, sweetheart,” Penny said, maintaining her smile yet. 

The musician, evidently almost paralyzed with terror, still played on.

" _We will welcome to our number the loyal true and brave, shouting the battle cry of freedom!"_

“And you’re a long way from Dixie,” Cheryl shot back.

“Come on, darling,” she tried again. “The war’s over.”

Cheryl took two steps closer and stuck the revolver between Penny’s eyes.

“Not mine, you rebel harridan.”

Penny closed her eyes and quick counted to three, like she used to do when she needed to cool her head.

“Malachi, honey, what year is it?”

“Year of our Lord 1868,” Malachi answered instantly.

“That’s _three_ years since Appomattox,” extrapolated a beleaguered Penny. “So why don’t you just…wind your way back east, and put that silly little gun down, and we won’t have to kill you?”

“Where’s your boss?” Cheryl demanded.

“My _boss_?” Penny laughed. “What makes you think I still have a _boss_ , girlie?”

Cheryl drew back the hammer on her gun.

“Now why’d you do that?” Malachi Protested. “There was already a perfectly good bull—“

“Shut up.” Cheryl swung her gaze to Malachi and back to Penny. The rest of the saloon watched lazily. “Where _is he_?”

Penny sneered. “Lean in a little closer, honey, and I’ll tell you.”

Then Malachi sprang into action. He snatched up a handful of poker chips from the table and hurled them into Cheryl’s face. She stumbled back and fired wildly. Two shots, both went wide and smashed through a saloon window. Penny ripped her gun out of its holster and fired. She missed, too.

Cheryl scrambled behind a table, reoriented herself, then sprung back out and fired. She caught Malachi in the shoulder as he struggled to draw his own weapon. He howled and shrank back like struck by a rattlesnake. Penny fired back at her opponent. Cheryl felt two rounds whip past her head. One nicked the brim of her hat.

The musician in the corner threw down his guitar and pressed himself flat to the ground. Cheryl squeezed off her last shot, which missed Penny by a few inches, then snatched up the guitarist’s instrument by the neck and hurled it at Penny. It struck her in the head and she cried out.

“Come on!” She shouted, and then grabbed Malachi by the hand and pulled him towards the doors.

Cheryl leapt up and followed, slipping her emptied gun back into her belt.

The two erstwhile Ghouls dashed into the night, Malachi still-half hobbling and clutching his injured shoulder. Penny whirled around a corner. Malachi followed.

Then there was the unmistakable crack of a Winchester, and Malachi’s right thigh exploded in a fountain of gore. He cried out again and sank to the dusty road as his companion quite literally left him in the dust. Penny made another turn, and disappeared into a dank alley, and was gone. 

Cheryl stopped running and settled back into a stride. She sauntered over to the incapacitated Malachi, slipping six new rounds into her gun. He tried feebly to crawl away, a gory trail dripping in his wake.

From an emptied general store across the road, another dark figure leapt out of a shattered window, clutching a Winchester rifle. The figure jogged over to Cheryl and the mutilated fellow in the street.

“Half-decent shot, Veronica,” Cheryl said, dryly.

“Devil take your ‘half-decent’,” Veronica retorted.

They stood together over their quarry, who’d hauled himself up to his elbows now and was trying desperately to staunch the bleeding from both his shoulder and thigh.

“You fucking bitch,” he sobbed.

“Where’s Penny heading?” Veronica demanded.

“Fuck you! Ah, goddamn, I’m—“

Cheryl aimed the revolver at Malachi’s heart.

“Much as I enjoy watching the life leak from your wretched carcass, tell us what we want to know, and we’ll see to it you get the finest medical care Santa Fe has got to offer. And you'd best be quick about it, for your own sake."

“Goddamned yankees! All you've won i—“

Veronica jabbed the Winchester into his ribs.

“Where’s my father?”

“Last chance,” Cheryl concurred.

“Bitch,” he seethed, and spit blood. “Wish we’d killed you at DeCarlo’s Mill.”

“Well, to your eternal regret...” And Cheryl fired three shots into his chest. Blood dribbled out over his shirt, and he fell back, very dead.

“Are you out of your goddamned mind?” Veronica shouted. “Wh—“

“Oh, he wasn’t going to give us anything worth a damn. And he would have bled out in the next…five minutes, anyway.”

“Well now we’ve got _nothing_ , and we’re _right_ back where we started. We don’t know where my father is, we don’t know where Penny will head, we rode all this way an—“

“Cool your fiery passions, Veronica Lodge y del Valle” Cheryl knelt down next to Malachi’s corpse. “We know these two have been in Santa Fe for some time. We can assume they’ve been traveling together all this time, and therefore we can probably assume they’re still in your father’s employ. Or orbit, at least.” Cheryl stuffed her hands into Malachi’s coat, and came back a moment later with a bundle of papers hastily tied together with a piece of twine. Still, one could see that at least a few of the myriad documents were maps. Crudely drawn, but clearly new. “And…we know whatever’s in these. So let's find out, shall we?"

Cheryl thumped Veronica in the chest with the papers, and grinned. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a few references in this one


	4. the Halls of Montezuma-part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this got way longer than I meant it to so I'm splitting it into two parts
> 
> Enjoy 'this guilty land'-verse Parentdale

** "** _ Y_ _ou have been baptized in fire and blood and have come out steel!" _

-General-in-Chief of the US Army Winfield Scott, 1847

* * *

 

** September, 1847 **

 

“Afternoon, Frederick.”

Frederick nodded a half-acknowledgement. FP slithered up alongside him, crawling on his belly and elbows. He’d lost track of his regiment some time back. The entirety of the assault had degenerated into a wild mob surging towards the walls of Chapultepec like a great blue wave.

“Look at that,” Fred said very nearly breathlessly. FP was as ever amazed by his friend’s fatal proclivity to fixate on little curiosities to the exclusion of the world at large. ‘The world at large’ right now meaning a battleground. Mexican guns growled like dragons and raked the field with cannon fire. Skirmishers at the crest of the hills enfiladed the advancing Americans with volleys of musket fire. But Fred was singly focused on the squat, solid shape of Chapultepec castle rising up out of the marshy earth like a dark mountain. “Did you ever think you’d see a real castle?” Fred asked, almost innocently.

“I never really gave it much thought,” FP cracked.

From the highest spire of the castle, the Mexican tricolor flew in brisk defiance of American shot and shell. FP watched a battalion of Kentucky volunteers rushing on with the stars and stripes floating proudly over them. The enemy lashed their ranks with a truly vicious blast of grapeshot and half of them fell. Then he turned again to his friend, and watched the minuscule contractions in the muscles of his face each time an especially fierce crackle of rifles sounded out. The way Frederick's eyes and eyebrows twitched and flinched with each report. FP’s nerves had long ceased to respond in such a way to the sounds of the fray. But he didn’t think that spoke much to his courage. More to his deadened mental faculties.

“They’re not giving an inch today, are they?” Fred asked. He gestured vaguely to the fortress with the tip of his bayonet.

“We’ll take the place,” FP assured him, with little thrill in his voice. “We always do.” He shook his head. “You still like the US Army?”

“There are worse ways a man could spend his days.”

“Yeah, well, your term’s only one year,” FP replied dryly.

The closest of Chapultepec’s walls was only some fifty yards forward. The parapets were thick with Mexican soldiers. Santa Anna’s men whooped and hollered as they fought, daring the yankees closer. But it was mostly bluster. The guns were hopelessly primitive and the muskets little better than hurling stones. FP figured if fifty or sixty Americans found the guts for a charge, they could storm the walls and establish a foothold in the place before the foeman knew what hit him. But that would take more organization than existed at the moment.

He heard Fred murmur a short, simple little prayer, and wished he still had the faith to do that.

Still, his friend’s voice tempered the terror of battle just slightly. It was good to have a friend. Even if the hills of Mexico were an odd place for such a reunion.

FP Jones had been a regular soldier in the United States Army for two years when the Mexican War burst forth on the banks of the Rio del Norte. It had been as many years since he’d seen his hometown of Riverdale. That was okay. He was a rough-hewn man and army life suited him well. Solitude was the soldier’s lot, and it was his, too.

So FP had been quite surprised when, mustering at Veracruz, he’d made the reacquaintance of his old friend Frederick Andrews, and a few men from Riverdale besides. With the outbreak of war, every young man with two arms and legs wanted his part in the struggle for national glory. And that was the difference between the regulars and the volunteers. If you put on a uniform in peacetime, you were desperate, indigent, or an Irishman. In short, you were a man like FP Jones. If you flocked to the colors under threat of war, you were adventurous, idealistic, or a patriot. In short, you were a man like Frederick Andrews.

Fred looked absurd in his tsachko, the uniform didn't sit right on his shoulders or at his waist. FP kept remembering that it was  _temporary_. Frederick Andrews was a  _volunteer_. That was why he didn't quite fit. One day he'd go home. It filled him with pity, sorrow, and envy. 

“For you, it’s an adventure,” he’d told Freddy on the road from Veracruz, dust thick on their lips as they stormed their way up from the shining coast through the beauteous, malarial jungles and Indian villages. “For me, it’s a day’s work.”

Fred had shrugged and said it was tough, but when the country called, men had to answer. FP asked if it was really his country. 

"Is it?" Fred had questioned. 

"Well I was born in County Clare," FP had said dryly.

"Do you  _remember_ Ireland?"

"No. But folks here don't much care what an Irishman does or doesn't remember." 

" _Regesen los putos Yanquis a Washington!"_ FP heard a Mexican officer urge his men from up on the peaks of Chapultepec. "Send the goddamned yankees back to Washington!"

“Why the hell are they still fighting?” Fred questioned, evidently in all sincerity. “They can’t carry the day. They’ve got to know it.”

Another American shell screamed overhead and smashed into the castle, blasting out showers of stone and mortar. More shouts from the Mexican troops on the walls.

“Would you give up?”

Fred regarded his friend

Any minute now some colonel or lieutenant would ride up from behind and tell them they were to advance and advance _now_ , and then they’d be scrambling up the castle walls, bayonet to bayonet, hand to hand. In all likelihood one of them would die. FP pressed himself flatter to the ground. His pack weighed on his back. It was all part of the game.

And then on cue;

A white charger rushed up and past them. The animal’s hooves danced around flickering bullets and shell. Rigid in the saddle, Colonel Blossom waved his saber urgently in the direction of Chapultepec. His mouth was moving and his face was flushed bright red. FP couldn’t hear but he could guess. Something along the lines of “go in! Go in!”

FP smacked Fred on the shoulder. His lips were parched. He was going to need a drink after this. Maybe there was some liquor in the castle's cellar, God willing. 

“Well, let’s go in, Freddy,” FP said with the sangfroid of an expectant actor slipping onstage. And he sprang to his feet and clutched his musket tight, and all along the line the American troops rushed at the fortress walls.

* * *

Colonel of Volunteers Clifford Henry Blossom yanked back the reins on his flustered thoroughbred. The animal was nervous and entirely unfitted for battle, but it was such a magnificent beast he’d hate to exchange it for a more practical mount. It would be the death of him. Literally, most likely.

A shell exploded over his head. Showersof lead and fire washed the earth ahead of him. He wheeled hard to the left and then trotted forward, just ahead of the advancing infantrymen.

He was thinking about the heart.

Everyone spoke of the heart as if it were the seat of the human spirit. The heart broke and yearned and burned. But scientific inquiry had long proven that reason and conscience in fact resided in the brain. But then why did the heart respond so readily to elation or distress?

Only two weeks past at Churubusco Clifford had watched an Illinois volunteer’s skull blow apart with a direct hit from a Mexican sharpshooter. Could a man—a soul—really be annihilated so easily? Just ruin that brief expanse of tissue between the ears, and you could take the most brilliant mind out of the world.

And then he realized he was doing it again. Father always told him he was a flighty fool who couldn’t entertain two thoughts at a time. That wasn’t true. He’d taken nearly two years to utter a word as an infant, but it wasn’t because he was a simpleton as his parents feared. He’d simply been satisfied within himself. He never felt the need to talk when he was tangling with his own thoughts. Even in the midst of a battlefield. He forcibly restored himself to the moment.

Clifford dug his spurs into the horse’s flanks and dashed forward. He raised his saber and caught the Mexican sun in its gleaming blade. There were yet no foemen to meet his steel, but there would be. He galloped on through ranks of massed infantrymen in their blue coats flecked with dust and powder. Men stopped to raise their hands and cheer him as he passed.

He thought he saw Frederick Andrews and Jones stumbling through a gully side by side. God willing he would not have to carry any corpses back to Riverdale or prepare any letter of condolences. He did _not_ have a way with words.

The Mexican national colors fluttered from the heights of Chapultepec. Harney had said the man to bring it down would win himself a few dollars and a brevet rank. Clifford hardly needed gold, but the commission…to come home to wife and children a _general_. He licked his lips and charged deeper into the blistering fight.

The bullets whizzed by like an April shower and he imagined a ball striking a lucky blow and splattering his hopeful brains across the haunches of his horse. And that would be that. And he was distracted again.

He didn’t see the Mexican missile until it exploded twenty feet to his right and sent a bunch of fiery shot slicing through the horse under him. Clifford felt pinpricks of flame rake his thigh, and then he was suspended in the air, and then he struck the earth with enough force to snatch his breath. His beautiful thoroughbred, half-skinned in the blast, sank down dead.

Clifford lay on his back, feeling his thigh pulse in agony, and unwilling to examine what was surely a grievous mutilation. The sky overhead was so _clean_. It was a blue unknown in New York, or any land he’d ever traveled for that matter. He squinted and couldn’t find a single cloud. Not even a wispy cotton speck on the horizon.

Cotton.

He suddenly thought of Hiram Lodge, the odd young man they’d picked up in Santa Fe. He’d said this war was about cotton. That Polk’s constituents in the south had engineered it to carve new slave territory from Texas and Alta California. But that wasn’t so, was it? They had just cause, didn’t they? The Mexicans had drawn first blood, hadn’t they? He was a Democrat, but he was not a doughface. The abolitionist firebrands in Boston weren't helping matters, but neither were the great southern planters who loved their ‘peculiar institution’ better than the republic itself. Hadn’t there been a time when all agreed that bondage was wicked? 

Blue-coated soldiers rushed on around them. At least two dozen thundered by, hardly taking notice of their stricken colonel. 

Did his men love him? Suddenly he felt a strange wave of sadness. If he died here in the dirt, who would much care? He’d heard Frederick Andrews complaining to the other volunteers once what a ‘cold bastard’ then-Lieutenant Blossom was. He wasn’t made of stone, was he? He had feeling in him, even if it struggled to break the surface at times. Penelope would care, wouldn't she? Were his children too young to care?

Five feet away from him sat the silver locket that had somehow gone flying from his neck in the blast. Clifford rolled over and scooped up the muck-spattered treasure. The lid was twisted and bent with heat and pressure, but the little picture inside was—miraculously—unmarred.

Clifford dragged himself to his knees and examined the blurry little daguerrotype. Photographs had long lost their novelty for many, but not for him. The principle was so amazing. He knelt in the bloody Mexican dust, and he could gaze into the perfect likeness of his wife and twins, 3,000 miles away.

* * *

“You should!” Clifford had insisted.

“They’re so eerie,” Penelope protested. “And not in the way that charms me.”

He placed a hand on her shoulder. It was the flowering of Spring. The snows in the Evergreens forest evaporated. Turgid streams of melting ice dribbled through furrows and hillsides. The Sweetwater River was thick with crumbling ice floes. Green pushed its way up through the cracking grey of winter.

“You’re afraid of progress,” Clifford charged.

Penelope turned her head to look at him. She was much shorter. She still wasn’t sure she’d acclimated to it. He looked down at her, keeping his eyes away.

“Isn’t it odd?” Penelope asked, and she wrinkled her nose. “To have your likeness preserved for all eternity like that? On a little scrap of paper?”

“It’s the future,” Clifford said.

About six months ago Abel Cooper had made an investment in a load of photographic equipment from the city, and in the time since had been a tidy and burgeoning profit from the more well-heeled citizens of Riverdale. Of course, it was his son Harold that really took care of the process itself, along with the printing, but that was incidental.

“I suppose,” Penelope sniffed. “If you fall on some distant battlefield…you might like to clutch my image to your heart one more time.”

“Certainly,” he concurred, though Penelope thought this moment was probably the least martial he’d looked since coming back from West Point. She could see he was sick with apprehension. She turned the word over in her mind again and again, and sometimes slipped it onto her tongue, where it felt weighty and hot.

Mexico.

What was there to Mexico? Why should a man from New York or Illinois or Mississippi go and fight on the Rio del Norte? For land? Or was it honor?

Their two children sat playing in Thornhill’s parlor, chubby four-year-old fingers manipulating toy horses and tin soldiers in fantastic little battles. It was Cheryl, actually, who had inherited more of the martial Blossom spirit than her brother. If Jason was left to it he would probably be content to pour through the picture books in Clifford’s study or walk the gardens with his mother, hand in hand. But Cheryl would never ‘leave him to it’.

Cheryl had said she hoped their father would whip the Mexicans good, and then Jason had innocently asked her what the Mexicans could have done that was so bad? And if it really was so bad, why they couldn't simply be punished the way he and his sister were when they misbehaved?

Penelope grimaced. Her children needed their father more than Mr. Polk needed another soldier.

But the history of the Blossom clan was a military one, and it would take more than a generation to stamp it out.

Clifford was the child of her great uncle Abner. He hailed from those venerable New York Blossoms, the ones who had so gloriously rallied to standard of the revolution. Not like her own cadet branch of the family in Virginia, who, to their everlasting shame, had stood by the British crown. Penelope couldn’t help but wonder if the excited insistence of the family at large on their marriage wasn’t in part to wipe away that stain by marrying her to the son of a Patriot war hero.

And of course, Abner had wanted a bride for his boy, who he was beginning to fear was less than a man. If West Point had not created him an heir worth the name, perhaps a wife would. They had not lashed her and driven her to the altar like some sepoy’s betrothed, but perhaps everything short of that.

It had taken her some time to love him, and she suspected, him her. He was taciturn and grim. He tended to stick to his books and his horses. Even in his new uniform he didn’t look too soldierly. But he was fair, and he could be attentive. And though he was difficult to draw into conversation, when he was he could be wondrously captivating. And he was thoughtful, even to the exclusion of tactful. He was a good, solid, and firm man, and those were rare. And he was needed here.

But what man would leave his country’s call unanswered?

He looked down at her, smiling sheepishly, hands behind his back. His blue lieutenant's uniform was rumpled at the ankles and shoulders. He still looked so young, even if he was now twenty-seven. She couldn’t help but smile.

And she would take the photograph, like he asked.

They scooped up their cherubic little ones, squabbling over who got to play with the toy voltigeur, and in the sable oak carriage that had been cousin Petunia’s wedding gift, rattled into town.

Harold Cooper nodded his head and prepared the necessary mess of equipment. Clifford squeezed her hand and urged her to the seat. She tried her best to sit perfectly still, and it wasn’t so hard because she’d done a lot of sitting very still in her life. Clifford hoisted little Jason up into her arms, and she picked up Cheryl. To get them situated would be a nightmare she’d feared, but they complied soon enough.

The camera flashed noisomely and her first thought was that it was like a cannon.

They received the daguerrotype some days later, and she cut it down and slipped it into a silver locket and handed it to her husband.

“Look at that,” Clifford said, smiling. “The most beauteous photograph yet produced.”

“Yet,” Penelope clarified.

And that was the spring of 1846. It was the fall of 1847, now. Mexico seemed would not admit she was beaten, and so the war would go on longer yet.

Penelope couldn’t dwell on it too much. Clifford and Mr. Polk had their war to fight—fine! She had her own duties to attend to.

She directed the estate and she did it well. She cleared away that horrendous tangle of vines near the graveyard that must have been growing since before the revolution. She renovated the lawn. She hired a crew of workmen from Greendale to burnish Sir Henry Blossom’s mausoleum and hew down some of the trees that had grown too near the terrace.

“A lot of work for a lady alone, isn’t it?” asked Thomas Keller one evening when he called on her, something he promised her husband he’d do regularly.

“It’s work that’s got to be done,” she told him.

“If you ever need any help…”

“I’ll find it, Mr. Keller,” she said, politely but firmly.

Penelope leaned out over Thornhill’s terrace. Cheryl and Jason played in the yard, dashing through the bushes and singing a bit of doggerel suddenly on the lips of every American under the age of ten:

 _“Old Zack’s at Monterey, bring out your Santa Anner;_ _For every time we raise a gun, down goes a Mexicaner!”_

Penelope closed her eyes. She doubted the average man on the street had any better an appraisal of the war or the world at large than her two little ones frolicking in the rosebushes. The twins charged at each other, imaginary flags flying and fictitious drums beating. They ‘fell’ dead and giggled. Cheryl loved to play musketeer or dragoon. And wasn’t that really what the scores of young volunteers were doing?

Her grandfather had told her stories of Saragota. The American boys marching off to whip 'Santa Anner' would get their taste of glory soon enough.

“Can I be a soldier one day?” Cheryl asked sweetly.

“No, love. Thank God.”

“Father’s a soldier!”

“Unfortunately.”

“Bu—“

“You’ll _never_ be a soldier, my darling,” Penelope said brusquely. “And one day you’ll see what a blessing that is.”

That night she sat near the fireplace, thumbing through Irving's _Tales of a Traveller_. It was great stuff, and at moments she could almost felt she was in the dark wood with Tom Walker and the devil, or at the foot of the guillotine with the young German student. It was fantasy of course, but there was reality to it. The guillotine really had ruled Paris, and perhaps there really had been shadows in the forest. She was always fascinated that you could preserve a whole world in ink. Today was built on yesterday. Roots run deep.

“Mother?”

Jason toddled up to her, unable to sleep. It was a curse of the blood. She sighed and brought the boy into her lap, for the moment setting Irving aside.

“What is it, dear one?”

“Will the war be over, soon? So father can come home?”

Penelope never liked to coddle her twins or soothe them with falsehoods.

“No, I don’t believe so,” she said brushing away some of his tangled red hair.

“Why not?” He asked, big eyes watering.

“I suppose Mr. Polk and Mr. Santa Anna haven’t had all their fun yet.”

“What fun?”

She nuzzled her boy.

“Shooting and stabbing. Lancer, horse, and voltigeur,” Penelope said, putting a bit too much flower into words meant for a child. 

“That’s not fun,” he pouted.

“Then you’ll never make a good soldier, and I'm glad of it.”

* * *

Hiram Mariano Anthony de la Vega y Lodge sat prettily atop his horse. The spyglass was a perfect piece of engineering—it really looked like the castle and the slopes were only a few yards away. He could see the straps on the soldiers’ packs and even pick out hair color and hue of skin. Amazing. Hiram’s horse lazily flicked its tail and stuck up its ears. The beast hardly seemed bothered by the booming of cannon. A good choice for a mount. He’d made a lot of good choices lately.

The epicenter of the battle was some five hundred yards away. Hiram figured barring a very lucky stray shell or ball, he was safe here. The Mexicans up until this point in the campaign had hardly covered themselves with glory. They’d made a decent showing at Buena Vista and put up a bit of a fight at Cerro Gordo, but in the end they always broke. Even Santa Anna, that old villain of the Alamo, couldn’t do much with these feckless generals and reluctant soldiers. Half of the men in the Mexican army didn't even know they were Mexicans—Indians plucked by federal commissioners out of their rural villages hardly changed since the days of the Triple Alliance, driven into the ranks at the point of bayonet. A good number spoke only Zapotec or Nahua, and not a word of Spanish. What was Mexico to them? Certainly not anything worth dying for.

But now that the yankees were at the gates of the capital resistance stiffened. And it looked like the Americans would have to carve their way through every room of Chapultepec castle.

Hiram collapsed the spyglass and handed it down to the lance corporal standing at his horse's haunches. 

He watched the Mexican tricolor flapping desperately over the castle’s peak. Bloody as the contest might be, that flag would come down and the stars and stripes go up. He decided he’d made a good investment. He always made good investments. That was his talent.

It had been almost a year now since the yankees marched into Santa Fe. Only three weeks after Hiram buried his mother. The last bit of his faith in God and the Virgin had gone into the ground with her, but he almost had to imagine it was some kind of divine providence.

He was twenty-three years old and without ancestors. The old man who'd sired him had stuffed himself into his moth-eaten Spanish uniform and galloped off when Hiram was seven years old and not been back since. There were political games to play in the capital and no time for his young American bride or his little son. So Hiram was left with his sullen mother in Santa Fe, to molder forever in local prominence. ‘Someone’ in Santa Fe was ‘no one’ anywhere else. He hadn’t hated his father so much when he’d left, but as the years went by the resentment grew. Enough that when he was sixteen he’d decided he was going to be Hiram, not Mariano, and that his surname was going to be his mother’s ‘Lodge’ and not his father’s ‘de la Vega’.

He’d met Hermione some years after that, when she’d come with her ailing father, from Alta California. He'd passed soon after, and it was a whirlwind romance if there ever had been one. They both needed _something_ , and why not each other? She was beautiful enough, and he was handsome enough.

And now they had little Veronica, playing innocently in the Santa Fe sun and the shade of an old Spanish courtyard. They were notable in that little city, but nowhere else. He could become king of Santa Fe and it would mean nothing to the world. 

He could do whatever he liked for himself and his family, it wouldn’t raise them out of the little New Mexico backwater or make him anything worth a damn. Until the yankees arrived. Everyone knew the Americans had long coveted the Mexican lands above the Rio del Bravo. Well enough, Hiram said. Let them come. Northern Mexico was a wasteland, but the industrious yankees with their railroads and their farmers could make something of it.

So when the first blue-coated soldiers and dragoons trooped into Santa Fe, he came out to greet them with all the good cheer he could manage. In his perfect English, with a Spanish word thrown in here and there for charm, he welcomed the US soldiers into his humble city. With the help of Hermione and few other local notables, he organized _fandangos_  and feasts for the lieutenants and the colonels, and plied the ranks with all the wine and dark-haired beauties they could stand. The yankees would win, and when Columbia stood mightily over a prostrate Mexico, he intended to stand there beside her.

“My name is Hiram Mariano Anthony Lodge y de la Vega. Welcome to Santa Fe!” He said cheerily to a young American lieutenant, opening a bronzed palm and clasping the New Yorker’s fair hand.

The young lieutenant’s name was Clifford Blossom, of the New York Regiment of volunteers. He was an effective, able, if cold and impassive man from some little town called Riverdale. He was someone Hiram could work with.

“Good to know you, _Señor_ Lodge,” Clifford replied firmly.

“‘Mister’ is fine,” Hiram assured him.

Soon he’d managed to attach himself to Blossom’s brigade as unofficial advisor and interpreter. And when the yankees marched south over the del Norte, he was with them. Amidst the smoke and blood and the smashing victory of Monterey, Hiram realized he’d made the right choice. He’d chosen the right side.

He brought himself back here, to Chapultepec in the fall of 1847, at the gates of Mexico City. On the castle walls the American troops scrambled up siege ladders, climbing and cutting with impressive dexterity. Things were almost finished up.

Hiram turned to the left.

On this little hillock, in the shadow of Chapultepec, within sight and earshot of the fray, stood a hastily erected gallows. Some forty prisoners languished in brisk, military order beneath the high beam, ropes lashed around their necks. Their feet found precarious purchase in the beds of mule carts, one to a man. Sometimes they would raise their voices and cheer when a Mexican gun scored a direct hit on a knot of bunched up US infantry. But when the signal was given, the mules would be whipped, and the animals would trot obliviously forward, and the condemned men would hang.

Hiram shook his head. The corporal beside his horse squinted up at him.

“Are you alright, sir?”

“Just fine,” Hiram replied.

He watched the men on the gallows with a mixture of half-pity and bewilderment. The gulf between them was immense. He made a shrewd, rational choice, and now he was poised to share in Scott’s great victory. They’d made their choice, and now they would hang for it.

These were the soldiers of Saint Patrick’s Battalion, the _San Patricios_ , that ragged collection of Irishmen complemented by Germans, Poles, and a runaway slave or two, who’d deserted from the ranks of the US Army to fight for the Mexicans instead. They would not fight against fellow catholics, they’d said. They would not persecute the yankee war of conquest against the Mexican Republic. Why fight for the 'glorious union' that treated them like dogs for their faith or birth and and consigned them to the mud sill of society? And wasn't Mexico offering land and work to any man who deserted? They would fight for freedom and worth rather than glory. So they’d turned traitor, for their consciences or otherwise, and now they’d hang.

Idiots.

Hiram really couldn’t understand. These men must have known from the beginning the Americans would win. There was never any real question about it. What madness could impel someone to step out of the ranks of an army ordained to victory in favor of one destined for defeat? Hiram imagined how coarse the hemp would feel around his neck. The brief moment of terror as the rickety cart slipped out from beneath his boots and he was suspended in air for just a moment. And the gasping, desperate terror as he slowly strangled. The black despair at the realization that he would _never_ speak or touch or think again.  _Never_ fulfill himself and the show the world what he achieve. What could those fools console themselves with now? That at least they died with their consciences clean? What was that worth? Could you measure right on a scale?

In a month, Hiram would be in the capital, roistering with the yankee officers. Then he would go home to his wife and daughter, a new man with a new purpose. Mexico had offered them nothing, but perhaps the great republic of the north would. And after that, God only knew. There were prominent voices on both sides of the Rio del Norte pushing for President Polk to annex all of Mexico to the United States. If that happened, likely he could win himself a governorship somewhere. Sonora, or the Yucatan. If not, perhaps, when the Americans returned home, he would simply go with them. He had certainly proved himself more than loyal and more than capable. Either way, his days in the shadows were over.

General Scott had ordered that when the Mexican colors came down and the stars and stripes went up over Chapultepec, the San Patricios were to hang. And in a month, their bodies would be rotting in a shallow Mexican grave.

Poor, stupid bastards.

Hiram shook his head again.

That was the difference between him and them. They would rot and he would shine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to give a bit more weight to the ones that didn't get quite as much exploration in the episode.


	5. the Halls of Montezuma-part II

" _I do not think there was ever a more wicked war.._ _."_

-Ulysses S. Grant, 1879

* * *

**September, 1847**  

FP sprang off of the last rung on the ladder and hurled himself up over the first of the castle walls. Another soldier gripped him by the belt and pulled him over. He turned around, stretched out his hand, and helped FP clear the parapet. They were in. Now they had only to clear out the place. Room by room.

He looked into his friend’s dusty, battered face. Frederick was bleeding from his lip. His eyes still had all their light, manful luster. FP wanted very much to send him home. The army was for men who had no hope. He wanted him to turn around and march back to Riverdale and forget all about bayonets and rifles. He had a _boy_ for God’s sake. A little child hardly three years old playing at his mother’s knee. FP had hardly believed him when he’d said so. A wife named Mary and a little boy named Archibald. He should be kissing his bride and raising up his son. He had hope. And so what in God’s name was he doing in the blue?

“It’s my duty,” Fred had answered with his determined, almost innocent big eyes. “Mary understands. Archie would, too.”

And FP had snorted in disbelief.

The walls trembled as the Mexican guns fired again.

“Forsythe!” Fred shouted, cutting through the veil of battle. “What’s the matter with you?”

FP shook his head. The Americans were securing their section of the wall. The Mexicans were being pushed back, but fighting and howling like devils all the way.

Colonel Blossom materialized out of the din again, a patchwork of ugly bruises down the left side of his face, a bloodied arm, and a tarnished saber. He looked to have taken a nasty spill somewhere. FP smirked a little. Not such an officer and a gentleman now.

Blossom waved his sword towards the interior of the castle, still thick with Mexican soldiers.

“Cut the bastards down! Go in! Go in!”

“Those must be the only two words he knows,” FP muttered as they launched themselves into the contest.

And a contest it was!

The enemy disputed every inch of stone and earth. Bullets became redundant as they were forced to throw fists and plunge with bayonets. They crashed through a great wooden gate and then they were inside Chapultepec. FP slammed his musket forward like a spear and rammed the point through a Mexican’s chest. It was a sea—a storm—of steel and dust, and he could hardly be sure which of the shapes in the morass was the enemy. He almost went into a trance, even as he slashed and beat away at his foes.

Then he heard a scream, and the trance was broken, because it was different from the other screams.

It was his friend’s scream. He whirled about and found Frederick having been dispossessed of his musket, struggling hand to hand with a vigorous Mexican rifleman. In the chaos of the shaking, crumbling castle he might have been the only one to take note of that little contest. Fred threw a punch and caught the Mexican on the jaw, to little result. The man slammed his elbow down into Fred’s teeth and FP saw blood dribble down his lip. The Mexican soldier went for his belt. He drew a long, ugly knife.

FP’s heart felt like it was on the verge of implosion. To die in this place was one thing, as was to kill. But dying was for soldiers. His friend wasn’t a soldier, even in a uniform and with a gun. He was a young man who didn’t know what things were and he was a _father_ for God’s sake, the fool. Above all else, Fred had to go home.

FP dashed forward and rammed his bayonet through the rifleman's chest. The man shot backwards, blood geysering out across his white coat. FP kicked over the fresh corpse, reached out a hand, dragged his friend to his feet, and embraced him.

Fred mumbled something that sounded like thanks.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” FP hissed into his friend’s ear. “I _challenge_ you to die here.”

When they broke out into the sun again, they were very near the peak of the castle. FP spared a glance down the sloping. The broken s _ierra_ , dotted with trees and gullies, was aflame. Foliage burned and earth crumbled. Thousands of little toy soldiers in their blue and white and green coats swarmed over the earth. The Valley of Mexico should have been beautiful.

On a little hillock dominated by the castle, he saw, and would not have seen if his eyesight had been just a little worse, the makeshift gallows Scott had ordered. And already noosed, and soon to dangle, the San Patricios.

That night across the river from Matamoros. Just after the shooting started. His back was lashed to ribbons. He’d taken an extra ration. And of course he had! They fed them like pigs. He lay on his belly, and every time a muscle in his shoulders twitched he gasped in pain. They wouldn’t have done this to him if he wasn’t who he was. If he was anyone but the wandering, destitute son of an Irish fugitive.

The flap to his tent opened.

O’Leary from the 2nd Artillery poked his head in. In the dark behind him crouched Johnny Collins.

“Forsythe, lad. We’re out.”

“Out where?”

“Out. Out of this goddamned Yank army. The Mexicans say any man who goes over to them’ll get a plot of land and the tools to work it. And maybe a commission, to.”

FP tried to sit up, but his whipped back wouldn’t allow it.

“So you want to commit treason, Michael O’Leary, that it?”

O’Leary snorted.

“Treason to what, Jones? This great fuckin’ republic takes Irishmen and every other man dumb enough to enlist and sends us running into cannon? To hell with this country and to hell with President Polk and General Taylor! For God’s sake they won’t even let us go to mass! You know, the church bells still ring in Monterey.”

“Not for long. You’ll end up at the end of a rope. The lot of you.”

"For God's sake, Jones! Your grandfather fought in '98! How can you stand the way they treat us in this army? They're no better than the bloody English!"

"They give me a square meal and pay."

"And that's all you need? Food and a warm barn to sleep in? Like a dog?"

"Go to hell, O'Leary."

“Sergeant Riley’s coming with us.”

“Then he’ll hang too,” FP snorted. “Let the goddamned officers call me an Irish cur all they like. Better that than I dangle from a branch for treason.”

“Suit yourself, if you want to spend your life licking Uncle Sam’s boots. I’ll see you from the other side of the field, Jones.”

FP turned on his stomach again.

And so O’Leary and Sergeant Riley and two-hundred other Irishmen besides had gone. Despised by their adopted land and the army they served, they chose another, and they fought on the Mexican side.

And now, in the shadow of Chapultepec, they were going to hang. He’d been right. He was smart, wasn’t he? The day after that the officers had mocked him for his tattered back. Served him right, the fenian scum. Help himself to an extra round of vittles, would he? Why didn’t he ask the saints to fix him up? He didn’t even believe in the church, for God’s sake. Or God at all, for God’s sake.

The San Patricios had given hell to their former comrades in arms in every battle from Matamoros to Buenaa Vista to Cerro Gordo. At their climax in Churubusco, the battalion’s murderous cannon fire from the Convent of San Mateo was the only factor to prevent an immediate collapse of the Mexican line. And they would not give in. Six times the Mexican soldiers tried to run up a white flag, and six times their Irish comrades tore it down.

When at last a detachment of Yankee troops stormed the convent and forced the Irishmen’s surrender, there were only some fifty left standing from near two hundred.

“Well,” FP had said, to Michael O’Leary as he was marched grimly past in a column of prisoners. “I told you you’d hang, you stupid bastard.”

O’Leary lowered his head and squinted. There was a cut above his left eye. Blood plastered the right half of his face so thickly it looked like war paint. His hair was puffed up and nearly white with dust.

“When my boots stop twitchin’, you’ll still be there in that spiffy yank uniform. And you can watch us dangle. And I can tell you, Jones from County Clare, that I won’t be ashamed to be an Irishman at the end of the rope.”

And then an American corporal jabbed him in the back with the stock of his rifle, and the column of prisoners got moving again. And FP watched them disappear into a cloud of dust. As they were marched away, he heard Johnny Collins belt out ‘The Wearin’ of the Green’ at the top of his lungs.

That was some weeks ago. And now, on the crest of Chapultepec, O’Leary’s words came to to pass.

He squinted down over hillsides at the little men at the end of their ropes. Literally. The moment the American flag went up over the castle the San Patricios would die

_There, but for a head on my shoulders go I._

Or was it…

_There, but for my cowardice go I._

* * *

Frederick Andrews reeled as a hail of Mexican musket fire from the next level of the castle roared past him and cut down a young marine two steps behind.

 _And the next will be for you,_ hissed the little spirit at the back of his mind.

He shivered and rushed over the broken stones of Chapultepec.

He was an idiot.

“You’re an idiot,” FP said to him when they met again for the first time in four years on the beach outside Veracruz.

Scott had just landed his 8,000 troops there, the New York Volunteers among them. And Freddy ran smack into Sergeant Forsythe Pendleton Jones, of the 7th Infantry Regiment, regular army. He’d known FP had gone off to be a soldier when they were still boys. He’d hardly expected to ever see him again. Certainly not here.

“What the hell are you doing in Mexico?”

“I volunteered,” Fred shrugged.

“For _what_?”

“The army,” Fred joked.

“I mean to ask _why_?”

“Fight for my country,” Fred replied again, with less conviction.We’ve

FP glared at him.

“The Mexicans are fighting for their country, too. And they’ve got a lot more to lose than us. Nothing but patriots down here. It’s not so much fun as you’d think.”

He clapped his old friend on the shoulder.

Scott’s army marched on Mexico City along the same well-worn roads Cortez had taken three centuries ago. Freddy was a volunteer and FP a regular. They did not march together. But when the soldiers stopped and rested in some little town discipline broke down, and the two friends could seek each other out.

Conversations were short and brisk at first.

There was a hot spring beneath an old Maya temple. FP stripped off his coat and dipped into the waters bare-skinned. Fred saw the deep lacerations in the flesh of his back.

“What the hell’s that?” He asked dreadfully.

“Regularly army discipline,” FP spat.

“What did you _do_?” Fred demanded.

“Verbal abuse of an officer. But worse, I was Irish when I did it.”

One choking hot July evening, the first week of march, they sat at the edge of a lost Indian village sunken into the thick jungle and the fogged ravines. It was a truly paradisiacal place. Perhaps Eden had looked like this. The people here in the main did not even speak Spanish, but rather the aboriginal tongue of this place, something called Nahua. It was like another world.

“Why’d you leave Riverdale?” Fred asked, knowing well the answer. His friend’s lips twitched.

“The army said I’d have a square meal and square pay. There wasn’t much work in town. I’d just put my mother in the ground. What should have held me down?”

Fred flinched. He remembered FP’s face after his mother had died. Just complacent. He expected all terrible things. It was in his blood. His mother had wished for burial in the earth of County Clare. That was impossible. So FP had fashioned a little sign-post, painted it with the words ‘County Clare’, and fixed it over her grave.

“Us. Our friends,” Fred answered. “Me.”

FP decided to switch course.

“Do you regret enlisting yet?”

“You’ve been in the army a lot longer than me. Do _you_?”

“No. But that’s only because I never had any better prospects.”

“And I do?”

“Sure. Become a woodworker like your father. Find a girl for God’s sake. But instead you come down here to die of the _vomita_ or Mexican bullets.”

“I already found a girl,” Fred said, and he’d be lying to himself if he said he wasn’t looking for the opportunity to introduce her, in name if not person.

“Oh?” FP asked, half-teasingly.

“Mary. You remem—“

“Miss Mary? Of course I remember her. Good God, I never imagined—“

“We’re married.”

“You’re ma—“

“We’ve got a little boy.”

“You’re joking. You’re _joking_.”

“No,” Fred said, face alight with a proud smile. He thought of Mary and little Archibald back home, and now that he was telling _someone_ , someone who might _care_ , he felt closer to them than he’d been since his departure. “His name’s Archibald.”

“You’ve got a wife and a little boy back home, and you’re in Mexico?”

Fred thought it over for a second. The possibility he might _really_ not come back never truly registered. But now it did. He felt a strange wave of dread. The jungle closed in on them. Some strange southern bird called into the evening.

He _was_ an idiot.

“I guess I am,” he answered at last.

“Well now I’ve got something to do besides put one foot in front of the other,” FP said after a little while.

“What’s that?”

“Keep you alive.”

* * *

Clifford laid his sword into the chest of a Mexican soldier. A spray of blood followed the arc of the blade, the man’s ribcage was opened, and he sank to the ground. The American storming party forced its way up another ancient stone stairwell. Old icons and flickering torches prepared their path. They were climbing. Climbing. Ascending. The Mexican flag still fluttered overhead. Behind him, a squad of four US Marines held the stars and stripes in their hands, ready to lift it in stead of their enemy’s banner.

The foe was in full retreat, now. Falling in disarray. Clifford ignored the agony in his thigh. He put aside the buzzing hornet swarms of musket balls. For once in his life his ability to shut out the world was doing him good. He stayed with the objective. _Raise the flag_.

They burst out onto the terrace at the peak of the castle’s highest tower. There was the flagstaff. There was their objective.

Except—someone had beaten them there.

A young boy, no more than sixteen, one of the Mexican cadets, had plucked the national banner down from its perch. He climbed up onto the tower parapets. The Americans watched, bewildered. The boy wrapped the flag around himself like a shroud. He raised a fist. Clifford absently pointed at him with his saber. “ _Viva Mexico libre!”_ The boy cried. And then he jumped, plummeting from the heights of the castle into the wooded ravines below.

Clifford blinked.

So the Mexicans had robbed them of that little victory at least. No one would bear the Mexican colors back to General Harney in return for praise and gold and a rank. No one would make a trophy of the flag. Clifford would not go home to wife and children a general. Amidst the bloodshed, the enemy had scored this triumph at least.

Clifford raised a hand and saluted the air where the young boy had stood.

The other soldiers filed in alongside him.

“Sir,” one of the marines tried to hand off the flag to him. He should raise it, of course. He was the ranking officer.

He handed the stars and stripes off to Corporal Frederick Andrews, who took it, confused.

“Go on, Andrews,” Clifford said brusquely. “Run it up. It’ll be a nice story for your boy.”

Andrews nodded and stepped forward to raise the flag.

Old Glory went up slowly. First she sagged and flickered in the lazy winds. Then the corners and fringes billowed out. And then the colors flew at full mast. Chapultepec was theirs. A mighty, roiling cheer exploded from the ranks.

* * *

On the hillock below the castle, the mules were whipped. They trotted forward. The San Patricios hanged.

As the Americans came down from Chapultepec, a fresh column of Mexican prisoners trailing behind them, they marched right past the dangling corpses.

“Poor bastards,” Fred said.

“I told them,” FP said firmly, struggling to avert his eyes. “They knew the stakes. Desertion means you get the noose.” He shook his head. Still wearing his spiffy yank uniform, just like O’Leary had said. There was O’Leary now, limp corpse turning slowly in the breeze. FP looked straight ahead. But he was victorious and they were not. Except—was he anymore victorious than a sword or a cannon?

“After this…” Fred began. “When you’ve finished your term. Will you come home?”

“Home?”

“To Riverdale?”

“Is that home?”

“Yes. Don’t be silly.”

“Is there any war back home?”

“Not last time I saw.”

They marched on. The corpses dangled in the chilling evening air. FP spared them one last glance. He ought to be swinging alongside them. He felt in the bottom of his chest the stories his mother had told him. The men of ’98 hanging in rows along the green lanes of Wexford, the English cross fluttering overhead. 

“ _Oh the wearing of the green, oh the wearing of the green, oh they’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reason FP doesn't mention Jughead even though he surely should have been born by now is because he actually doesn't know he has a kid yet. He's been in the army for going on four years, now, and two of those in Mexico. He conceived him with Gladys while on leave in Ohio and hasn't had the opportunity to find out he has a son yet.  
> He will, and that's what'll prompt his return to Riverdale once his term's over, but that's a story for another day.


End file.
